Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, Jens Südekum, and Nicole Woessner: The rise of robots in the German labour market: "Robots have had no aggregate effect on German employment, and robot exposure is found to actually increase the chances of workers staying with their original employer... http://voxeu.org/article/rise-robots-german-labour-market

Luigi Iovino and Dmitriy Sergeyev: Quantitative Easing without Rational Expectations
: "We study the effects of risky assets purchases financed by issuance of riskless debt by the government (quantitative easing) in a model without rational expectations...

Nick Bunker: Just how tight is the U.S. labor market?: "From the end of the 1991 recession until the second quarter of 2017, the prime employment rate explains about 80 percent of the variation in nominal wage growth...

Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: I endorse Duncan Black here. I am not going to ignore that this is a situation that calls for the removal of the President immediately via the Amendment 25 process. And shame on everybody else who pretends not to notice this:

...but I posted this at the time because it was obvious and no one in "serious" journalism could say it or even really suggest it. I don't mean I'm a sort of brave truthteller, I just mean I'm a dumb blogger who can say what he wants and journalists, for better or for worse, "can't" always (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not).

Larry Summers: America’s tax plan is not worth its name: "The US administration’s tax plan... a mélange of ideas put forth without precision or arithmetic.... The claims of Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, and Kevin Hassett, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, are some combination of ignorant, disingenuous and dishonest...

Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, Jens Südekum, and Nicole Woessner: The rise of robots in the German labour market: "Robots have had no aggregate effect on German employment, and robot exposure is found to actually increase the chances of workers staying with their original employer... http://voxeu.org/article/rise-robots-german-labour-market

Randall Morck and Bernard Yeung: East Asian Financial and Economic Development: "Japan, an isolated, backward country in the 1860s, industrialized rapidly to become a major industrial power by the 1930s... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23845

Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman: : "The equivalent of 10% of [annual] world GDP is held in tax havens globally...

Michael Geruso and Timothy Layton: Selection in Health Insurance Markets and Its Policy Remedies: "We begin by outlining some important but often misunderstood differences between two types of conceptual frameworks... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23876

This points to the problem of forging goals through consensus: they can end up being a wish list for everything short of heaven on Earth. But, to be effective, goals should operate like turnpikes, which allow you to make progress toward a specific destination much faster than if you had taken the scenic route. The purpose of consensus building, then, should be to get us to the on-ramp, after which it becomes harder to make a wrong turn or reverse course... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Whatever: NYT Review Fallout: There's been some interesting commentary and discussion following Dave Itzkoff's NYT Book Review piece on me and my books, so I thought I'd post links to some of them I've found, for the edification of Whatever readers. In no particular order: Instapundit notes the piece, and has some thoughts on the idea of [Robert Heinlein's novel] Starship Troopers being fascist, roping in Spider Robinson to rebut that claim...

I would dispute Scalzi's claim that either Glenn Reynolds or Spider Robinson has "thoughts" on this issue. I would characterize them as having "reflexes."

I think I had some "thoughts" on this issue some 10^8 seconds ago:

The Starship Troopers novel I originally read in the early 1970s had four layers:

It would be nice if I could start off October with another real DeLong smackdown: an incisive critique of a place where my argument has been wrong, or at least pathetically incomplete and one-sided.

But it is not to be: the environment is just too target-rich.

Somebody who wishes me ill sends me a link to Paul Gigot and Gerry Baker's execrable Wall Street Journal, and provokes me into clicking it. It is John Cochrane from Stanford's Hoover Institution: claiming a hypothetical tax rate is 20%, when five minutes' thought gets 42.9% as the true number:

Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Emil Verner: How do Credit Supply Shocks Affect the Real Economy? Evidence from the United States in the 1980s: "Does an expansion in credit supply affect the economy by increasing productive capacity, or by boosting demand?... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23802

Carol Christ: Chancellor's Letter to the Berkeley Campus Community on Free Speech: "Dear campus community, The past several weeks have been trying ones for Berkeley...

William Faulkner (1948): Intruder in the Dusthttp://amzn.to/2wZt4Ms: "For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863...

CBPP: Tax Reform Briefs: "Congress is expected to consider legislation to make major changes to the tax code this year. Here is a series of two-page explanations of key issues in tax reform... https://www.cbpp.org/tax-reform-briefs

Robert C. Feenstra and Akira Sasaharab: The “China Shock”, Exports and U.S. Employment: A Global Input-Output Analysis: "We quantify the impact on U.S. employment from imports and exports during 1995-2011, using the World Input-Output Database... http://cid.econ.ucdavis.edu/Papers/Feenstra_Sasahara.pdf

Supply-Side Amnesiahttps://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/republican-tax-cuts-budget-deficit-by-j--bradford-delong-2017-09: In the spring of 1980, Martin Feldstein co-taught (with Olivier Blanchard) the second-best macroeconomics class I ever took. (The best was a class I took from Olivier alone three years later.) From 1982-1984 Martin Feldstein served in Ronald Reagan's cabinet as Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. There he waged an effective if lonely bureaucratic war for the proposition that the size of the Reagan tax cut of 1981 had been a big policy mistake, and that America would suffer if that mistake was not repaired. That position was unpopular inside the Reagan White House: chief-of-staff James Baker tried to get everybody on to the page of delay, in the hope that something would turn up, and avoid the administration having to admit that its signature tax-cutting initiative was, at least in part, a mistake.

George Akerlof (1979): The Case against Conservative Macroeconomics: An Inaugural Lecture: "The old classical economics bases its case against the efficacy of fiscal policy on the low interest elasticity of money demand... http://delong.typepad.com/2553741.pdf

...Brad then requested that I write my ideas up in the form of a DeLong Smackdown. So here we go.

Brad's post was written in a particular context - the recent battles over right-wing speakers at Berkeley. More generally, the alt-right has been trying to provoke conflict at Berkeley, seeing an opportunity to gain nationwide sympathy. The murder of Heather Heyer by Nazis, and general white supremacist street violence, has turned the national mood against the alt-right. The alt-righters see (correctly) that the only way to recover rough parity is the "both sides" defense - in other words, to get people so worried about left-wing street violence that they equivocate between left and right. To this end, they are trying to stir up the most obvious source of potential leftist street violence: Berkeley.

By the last months of those years, Jabez Stone's known all over the state and there's talk of running him for governor—and it's dust and ashes in his mouth. For every day, when he gets up, he thinks, "There's one more night gone," and every night when he lies down, he thinks of the black pocketbook and the soul of Miser Stevens, and it makes him sick at heart. Till, finally, he can't bear it any longer, and, in the last days of the last year, he hitches his horse and drives off to seek Dan'l Webster. For Dan'l was born in New Hampshire, only a few miles from Cross Corners, and it's well known that he has a particular soft spot for old neighbours.

Matthew Yglesias: : The economy really is broken — but we know how to fix it: "The top 5 percent includes all the members of Congress and all of the donors and lobbyists and business leaders whom members of Congress speak to... https://www.vox.com/2017/9/19/16319416/broken-economy

Joseph E. Stiglitz: The Revolution of Information Economics: The Past and the Future: "The economics of information has constituted a revolution in economics... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23780

On fiscal policy, for my entire adult life, Republicans have fallen into four groups:

The few who care about a smaller government and about properly financing that government now and into the future.

Rather more who want a smaller government and who regard the higher debts and large deficits that result from tax-cutting policies misleadingly sold as not a bug but the feature: once the debt and deficit are created, some Democrats who sincerely believe in budget balancing will come over to the spending cut side.

Those who want to tax cuts and really don't care very much and whether they are good or sustainable policies.

Those who see an opportunity to profit personally by selling misleading rationales for tax cuts.

Nearly a quarter century ago, early in the Clinton administration, I was one of the leads on the team responsible for constructing estimate of the economic impact of NAFTA. And I definitely have some explaining to do.

George Akerlof (1979): The Case against Conservative Macroeconomics: An Inaugural Lecture: "The old classical economics bases its case against the efficacy of fiscal policy on the low interest elasticity of money demand... http://delong.typepad.com/2553741.pdf

David Card and A. Abigail Payne: High School Choices and the Gender Gap in STEM: "Women who graduate from university are less likely than men to specialize in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM)... http://www.nber.org/papers/w23769.pdf

And now, moving from the twenty-first century back 2500 years to a much earlier age of information technology: John Ma https://twitter.com/Nakhthor/status/908024914011193344—much peace and strength attend him!—reminds me of his "accessible edition of some letters of a member of the Achaimenid elite, the actual satrap of Egypt", Prince Arshama, quite possibly the great-grandson of King of Kings Darayavush I, writing in the late 400s B.C. to various of his subordinates http://arshama.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:

the Persian Artavanta on the ground on Egypt, who appears to be serving more-or-less in a public law capacity—recognizing property rights, and inflicting and remitting punishments.

the Egyptian Nakhthor, bailiff of Arshama in more-or-less a private management capacity.

the Persian Armapiya, commanding armed forces in Egypt, concerning his unwillingness to follow the instructions of Psamšek, who appears to be another of Arshama's bailiffs in Egypt.

plus some others, and a few letters from others to Nakhthor as well...

Should-Read: Nancy MacLean: DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS: THE DEEP HISTORY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT'S STEALTH PLAN FOR AMERICAhttp://amzn.to/2voi3qD: "As 1956 drew to a close, Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr., the president of the University of Virginia, feared...

...second Brown v. Board of Education ruling, calling for the dismantling of segregation in public schools with “all deliberate speed.” In Virginia, outraged state officials responded with legislation to force the closure of any school that planned to comply.... Darden... could barely stand to contemplate the damage.... Even the name of this plan, “massive resistance,” made his gentlemanly Virginia sound like Mississippi. On his desk was a proposal, written by the... chair of the economics department... James McGill Buchanan [who] liked to call himself a Tennessee country boy. But Darden knew better....

...Monday to find themselves in the lowest plane of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.

"I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"

The rest of Atta's words turned to raw-throated shrieks, as a tusked, asp-tongued demon burst his eyeballs and drank the fluid that ran down his face.

According to Hell sources, the 19 eternally damned terrorists have struggled to understand why they have been subjected to soul-withering, infernal torture ever since their Sept. 11 arrival.

Now "in the long run" this is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again...

Project Syndicate: Supply-Side Amnesia: While in the White House, Feldstein waged a persuasive but lonely bureaucratic campaign against the Reagan administration’s 1981 income-tax cuts, arguing that they had been too big, and would prove economically painful if not corrected.... If Feldstein’s warning had been heeded in 1982-84, America would be stronger and happier today. I was thus dismayed at his recent expression of optimism that under today’s Republican-led Congress, “a tax reform serving to increase capital formation and growth will be enacted,” while arguing that “any resulting increase in the budget deficit will be only temporary”... Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

The whole point of inheritance—financial, cultural, sociological—is precisely not to give everyone "the same shot". Inequality of Result + "inheritance" = Inequality of Opportunity. And that's not a good thing. Unless, that is, you think that you choose your parents, and should benefit if you were smart enough to choose them wisely...

Economists' theories—at least the economists' theories that I think are relatively well grounded—predict that globalization should have little effect on the broad distribution of income but should, instead, tend to lift all boats... READ MOAR at Project Syndicate

I suspect that somewhere out there—somewhere with a quantum wave function amplitude perhaps as large as ours—there is a well dredged Sacramento Ship Channel extending from the busy Port of Sacramento—second busiest on the West Coast behind Long Beach—down to the Golden Gate.

In that branch of reality, Sacramento was not buried under ten feet of water in January 1862:

Hoisted from 2001: Information Technology and the Future of Society (My Bekeley CITRIS Kickoff Talk)http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/citris_kickoff.html: For perhaps 9000 years after the beginnings of agriculture the overwhelming proportion of human work lives were spent making things: growing crops, shearing sheep, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, throwing pots, cutting down trees, copying books, and so on, and so forth.

Recent and Worth Highlighting...

About Brad DeLong

The Most-Recent Thirty

We Are with Her!

Looking Forward to Four Years During Which Most if Not All of America's Potential for Human Progress Is Likely to Be Wasted

With each passing day Donald Trump looks more and more like Silvio Berlusconi: bunga-bunga governance, with a number of unlikely and unforeseen disasters and a major drag on the country--except in states where his policies are neutralized.

Nevertheless, remember: WE ARE WITH HER!

Blogging: What to Expect Here

The purpose of this weblog is to be the best possible portal into what I am thinking, what I am reading, what I think about what I am reading, and what other smart people think about what I am reading...

"Bring expertise, bring a willingness to learn, bring good humor, bring a desire to improve the world—and also bring a low tolerance for lies and bullshit..." — Brad DeLong

"I have never subscribed to the notion that someone can unilaterally impose an obligation of confidentiality onto me simply by sending me an unsolicited letter—or an email..." — Patrick Nielsen Hayden

"I can safely say that I have learned more than I ever would have imagined doing this.... I also have a much better sense of how the public views what we do. Every economist should have to sell ideas to the public once in awhile and listen to what they say. There's a lot to learn..." — Mark Thoma

"Tone, engagement, cooperation, taking an interest in what others are saying, how the other commenters are reacting, the overall health of the conversation, and whether you're being a bore..." — Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"With the arrival of Web logging... my invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least. Plus, web logging is an excellent procrastination tool.... Plus, every legitimate economist who has worked in government has left swearing to do everything possible to raise the level of debate and to communicate with a mass audience.... Web logging is a promising way to do that..." — Brad DeLong

"Blogs are an outlet for unexpurgated, unreviewed, and occasionally unprofessional musings.... At Chicago, I found that some of my colleagues overestimated the time and effort I put into my blog—which led them to overestimate lost opportunities for scholarship. Other colleagues maintained that they never read blogs—and yet, without fail, they come into my office once every two weeks to talk about a post of mine..." — Daniel Drezner